Good bye, New York Times

Sorry New York Times, I do not buy this latest bout of crocodile tears.

The biggest political story of the US election did reach a dramatic climax but it was unexpected only because media such as yours tried your damnedest to fool the people with corporate and state pushed propaganda to tilt the playing field in favor of Hillary Clinton.

You stopped being neutral, and objective a long time ago. It was not Donald Trumps unconventionality that was the root cause – your corruption and lack of journalistic integrity was.

The election was divisive but the reason was far from what was projected by your media. It was divisive because one side was pushed by the entire corrupt establishment, of which you are a part and and the other side was those that stopped believing in you. Therefore everything you said was suspect. More you trashed Trump, more folks suspected there was something important about Trump that may be good for the people that the establishment does not like. More you ridiculed him, more he appeared a good candidate to those that stopped believing in you.

You should reflect on it all – but you are not going to continue to con past subscribers like me. I would not read you even if someone paid me to do so, forget about buying a subscription ever again.

You say you cannot deliver independent and original journalism without our support. The trouble is, you did not deliver those items even with our support.

Now, you claim you cannot do without us.
I for one, can and will do without you.

Good bye.

Tony Mitra

Angela Merkel on Huffpost – A warning, or hypocrisy?

Along with many other news sources, I have more or less stopped watching Huffington Post too, a part of the media trash. Nonetheless, this one came out of it, covering Angela Merkel’s supposed not-so-subtle warning. The title was carefully designed to get you interested and click to read further. I did not get it directly from Huffpost since I stopped looking at it. It nonetheless came to me through Facebook shares.

The main theme of this article, whether Merkel meant it or not – implies that Merkel is ready to work with the new president elect Trump, when and if both leaders share a common belief of equal rights to people of all colour and faith.

The article implies that Merkel suspects Donald Trump might not not allow equal human rights to people of skin colour other than white, or to people of faith other than Christianity etc etc.

In that, Merkel is conveniently mixing two issues and blurring a very important national concern for anybody. The two issues are : is supporting human rights the same thing as allowing unlimited immigration from anywhere?

This to me is one of the key elements to the problems in the global politics relating to the war torn middle east today. The so called immigrant issue, for Merkel and EU, involves people from the middle east. Why are they moving to Europe ? Not necessarily because they want free state support, easy money or a better lifestyle. They are moving primarily because their homes, cities, villages and mode of living have been bombed to smithereens, thanks to western manufactured bombs used on them either directly, or indirectly by the west.

Another way to look at it is – Merkel and the rest of warmongers, Hillary and Obama included, believe, rightly, that accepting all these homeless refugees is a moral responsibility, if they wish to continue to bomb more and more middle eastern towns, villages and cities. Accepting these immigrants is a price that the European and American societies must pay, so that the military industrial complex can continue to its business business as usual and the entering immigrants can then work at wages lower than the locals would accept, thus making it even cheaper for the corporations to make a buck.

It would have been smarter, to wake up to the fact that there is another way to solve this problem:

  • Stop the war
  • Stop the bombing
  • Spend the money to rebuild the devastated towns and cities
  • Make sure that the local people get the jobs
  • Ensure local firms get the contracts like the post war Marshall plan
  • Do not allow western firms and tycoons to milk the system again.

If you do all that and make the middle east great again, the people will not only stop wanting to move to Europe or North America, but those that already came would largely want to go back.

This is the first item that Merkel is mixed and made fuzzy.

The next item that she may be making fuzzy is questioning Donald Trump’s right to want to protect his own nation from endless ingress of refugees from exactly those war torn areas where most have been harmed by western war crimes and will likely to have many that hold a grudge against the west because of it. Trump may or may not follow up on what he stated during his campaigns, but what he did state is not that he denies human rights to brown skinned people or people of the Islamic faith – but that he opposes the US governments policy of bombing the shit out of everybody – and wishes to work WITH other nations and not FIGHT with them, and that he opposes endless influx of immigrants precisely from those areas where terrorists are mushrooming up.

I do not at all see this reasoning as a sign that Trump is either a racist, or that he despises people of colour or other religion.

The only thing I am uncomfortable with about Trump in this particular field, is his open declaration of supporting Israel in what appears to me to be a biased tilt towards it and calling out Iran as a demon. But I suspect he said it because he had to say it, and that, somehow, no American politician can rise to power without blessing of Israel – a strange and incomprehensible situation where a tiny tiny tribe of people can have such an overwhelming influence on the supposedly most powerful nation on the planet.

But, Angela Merkel too has been in the same rut, and will not say a word against Israel.

Other than that Israel angle, I see no real evidence that Donald Trump has been either a virulent racist or a virulent anti-Muslim or any-any other faith.

So, either Angela Merkel is a fraud, or Huffington Post is a fraud, or both of them are.

IF you want to address issues with human rights, racism or religious intolerance, Angela and Huffington post, start with Israel and Palestine first. Then, I am willing to listen to you and might stop considering you anything better than trash.

The decline and fall of mainstream media

Ten years ago, I used to subscribe to, or read often, daily and weekly news outlets such as Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, New York Times etc, as well as many other sources, and web sites, blogs and the social media.

I slowly stopped subscribing and reading the mainstream, as began to realize that these vaunted news sources were not real news, but market manipulations and perceptions of some of the writers, all of whom were stuck to a few universally accepted ideas that I was beginning to doubt – that constant rise of GDP measured in an unsustainable yardstick was the first and only measure of development, that constant upward development was a must, that only news was financial news, war news, sports news, or trivia.

In the last few months, I got thoroughly disappointed by almost all major news sources as I could clearly and plainly see that it was engaging in a concentrated attack on Donal Trump for minor or trivial issues, inflating them and turning him into a demon, while giving the nasty deeds of Obama-Hillary a total pass. I found it increasingly difficult to take any of these news sources seriously.

I came to realize another factor – the Democratic party of Hillary was far to the right of Donald Trump, and in fact, Hillary was likely more a fascist than Trump himself. And yet, even Jill Stein was identifying Trump as the fascist instead of Hillary! The world was gradually turning upside down and black was being painted white and vice versa.

I used to be an instinctive Democratic party supporter, somehow influenced in my school days by the charm of John & Jacqueline Kennedy. But I began to understand, now, that my fixation with the “liberal” wing was kind of wrong because the liberals were pretend liberals, and dishonest to boot.

I came to understand in the last fifteen years, the real dangers of removing the glass-steigel act and implementing NAFTA, the de-linking of currency from gold, and the ability of western economies to create vast amounts of money out of thin air, without any backing, and that all money thus created were in essence counterfeit money, legalized by state governments.

I came to understand the real goals behind the agendas of IMF and the world bank, and the reason WTO failed and the new drive for the west to create regional trade agreement so that difficult components and nations could be bypassed, thus writing down TPP and many other such localized trade deals, all of them designed to make money for multinational corporations and hurt local labour forces and remove the rights of nations to resist these efforts.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

I also came to understand that the war mongering of the US government was more a democratic party gift than a republican one. I remembered that the only ex-president that warned the American people of the threat posed by an all consuming military industrial complex was Dwight Eisenhower, a republican and not a democrat. I also came to understand how the one living Democratic ex-president that to me appeared to be morally straight and willing to call a spade a spade – Jimmy Carter, would denounce Israel’s apartheid policies in his book with regard to the treatment of Palestinians and US governments incestuous relationship with Israel. He identify USA not as a democracy any more, but as an oligarch with unlimited bribery. And now, the democratic party was trying to create as much distance as it could, with Jimmy Carter.

I found it hard to identify reliable news sources anywhere. Aljazeera english remained an interesting alternative, but it was way too far leaned towards Soudi and Qatar Governments and their obnoxious record in human rights and anti-shia blood letting and joining hands with Israel and the US to create a phoney civil war in Syria so the war machine can continue rolling.

I even found google news to be heavily biassed in favour of Hillary and I had to seriously fine tune google news asking it to specifically restrict sources like New York Times, Washington Post and the like.

I now find it amusing that The New York Times is asking me, here, to get back on board and start subscribing again….

Hahhhhh …. not a chance, buddy, you are not a news outlet. You and most others here are all paddlers. What I see is the death of mainstream news, replaced by rubble and a few paddlers, and a promising grassroots movement of a mass of citizen journalists mushrooming up through the social media.
___

Thought I’d move all these from ranting on Facebook, into a blog.

Vaccine-glyphosate link exposed by Anthony Samsel

Scientists Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff have just gotten the fifth peer reviewed paper on Glyphosate published. Its named “Glyphosate pathways to modern diseases V: Amino acid analogue of glycine in diverse proteins”. The interview on that has been covered in the previous blog.

The latest bombshell to come from Anthony Samsel is from the sixth paper, which is not yet published, but whose supporting data is already making waves – various popular vaccines are contaminated with glyphosate.

How? Well, vaccine makers sometimes use animal byproducts in vaccines, products such as chicken egg protein or gelatine that comes from bones. And if those vaccine makers are using animals that come out of factory farms, chances are they are fed GMO and glyphosate laced feed. If so, they would pick up Glyphosate into their system just as we humans do. Therefore, egg protein and gelatine made from these animals may also contain glyphosate, which in turn would then contaminate the vaccines that use these products. Finally, people, or animals, vaccinated with these products would have glyphosate directly injected into them, and will in due course have glyphosate initiating a cascade of diseases.

Anthony Samsel was not passing opinion on this. Rather, he collected vast samples of these popular vaccines and got them tested by multiple labs in USA for presence of Glyphosate, and found, as he suspected, the vaccines to be largely contaminated by it.

This 5 minute video covers only that part of the talk.

He has already alerted his Senator, as well as various Government and international organizations such as CDC, FDA and WHO.

What is the situation with Canada? It depends on where the vaccine makers have their plants. I don’t know if they have many in Canada. But the issue remains the same. Vaccine manufacturers might be using animals from factory farms, and may never have considered the issue of glyphosate contamination.

For Canada, the most important task would be to take samples of all vaccines and have them tested for presence of glyphosate.

For Canadians, it should trigger a grassroots movement demanding postponing all mass vaccination till we have the issue sorted and till we have forced the vaccine makers to use animals fed organically and tested to be glyphosate free.

I intend to use the content of Anthony Samsel’s letters, add my bit on Canada, as well as video such as this one, to alert our Canadian counterparts.

I request all readers of the blog to share it, and also consider writing to your local representative in the Government, or to the medical establishment, to consider taking a serious second look at this new information of glyphosate poisoning of some of the popular vaccines. The idea is not to ban vaccines per se, but to force the producers to use animals that are not fed GMO and glyphosate laced feed to start with, and to clean up their vaccines. Vaccines are meant to protect people, not poison them or make them sick.


Sample letter sent by Anthony Samsel

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5


Reference

Links to Anthony Samsel’s five peer reviewed papers can be found at ResearchGate, by typing in his name and browsing through his publications. Alternately, they can also be downloaded from here:


 

The road ahead on glyphosate

We have so far gone around the country, speaking about the dangers of chemical dependent agriculture, forestry and weed control in public places. We have had meetings with politicians, and joined marches against Monsanto. We have written to ministers and contacted labs about testing of Glyphosate in food.

And yet, Canada, its land, air, water, soil, flora, fauna and people are all getting systematically poisoned through introduction of batches of killer chemicals that are deemed safe by our Government, but whose safety documents are kept hidden from public scrutiny, which essentially makes the approval of these chemicals potentially illegal.

We have a petition asking Ottawa to release all hitherto hidden safety documents on Glyphosate to the people of Canada, with over 22,000 supporters. The details of this petition has been handed over to Minister Carla Qualtrough on April 27, to be hand delivered to the Minister of Health in Ottawa.

Apart from that, we have also asked Minister Qualtrough to try and arrange some public funds to start public testing local food and water in her own constituency, Delta, BC, for Glyphosate.

Jane Philpott

We have so far not achieved any measurable success. There is no response from the minister of health about disclosure of the safety documents. There is a separate access to information act application from me to the Ministry of Health asking for the same safety documents, which too are languishing, as the ministry drags its feet over the issue.

I might send her another letter, but there is no compulsion for the minister to respond to it and from the pace of follow ups, it may well be that Canadians shall not hear any feedback from the ministry, let alone disclosure of the safety documents, or a review of the approval of Glyphosate for Canadian agriculture.

As a result, I have started preparing another petition, this time not on change.org but on the Government web site using Government’s own official template. It is addressed also to the Minister of Health (Health Canada), and asks for public disclosure of safety documents for Glyphosate.

However, there are some steps that need to be taken before such a petition can be submitted. One of them is to have a sponsor, among the current Members of Parliament. I would have asked Mr. Alex Atamanenko to be the sponsor, if he was still an MP. Unfortunately he retired from politics last year. Next, I thought of asking MP Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. However, I have written to her in the past and never received any reply, and feel unsure of her willingness to help in this cause. I should ask my own MP first, honourable minister Carla Qualtrough, and I have done so in an email. However, I do not wish to feel her pressured in an awkward situation with her colleagues in the Government, so I do not know what her response would be.

As a result, I am kind of in the hunt, for a suitable MP that might take up this cause for Canadian people.

The draft petition

I invite readers to suggest a suitable MP. More importantly, if they personally know a good MP that could be interested to sponsor it, I encourage them to check with the MP first and let me know.

I have not done such an official petition before, so do not know if the system allows more than one sponsor, but believe it might. So, if more than one MP is willing to support this cause, I shall be very keen to contact them. I am thinking of approaching some of the other party members such as NDP and CP. Any help would be appreciated.

There is one more issue at hand – which is to try and push the movement for grassroots activism for people to get their local municipalities to set aside funds and start testing local foods and water for Glyphosate and to make the results public. I shall come to that hopefully in the next blog.

My blog itself had been hacked, taken down, and access denied. But all that has thankfully been solved after many days of off-and-on struggle. Allt things finally became OK yesterday, June 7th, in the evening. Hence today I have my first update again.

Send your suggestions to me.

Thank you.
Tony Mitra

Activist’s handbook on RoundUp resistance

Glyphosate and RoundUp are with us for a generation. And yet, their safety test records are kept hidden from the people. As I understand law, this hiding of safety data is illegal.

So, I have one Access To Information Act ongoing with the Canadian Government, to show to me all safety test data that is should have studied before approving the use of Glyphosate in Canadian agriculture. From correspondence generated through that, I have noted that the Government acknowledges my right to see such documents and yet drags its feet on disclosing them.

I have a separate petition on change.org, to ask Health Canada and the Prime Minister to release all safety test data on Glyphosate to the people of Canada, because hiding it would be illegal if the chemical itself is in our environment.

That petition has garnered 22,000 supporters, 98% of which are Canadians. I have since written to my MP, who also happens to be a cabinet minister in our federal Government, hon Carla Qualtrough, minister of sports and disabled persons.

She agreed to see me at the end of this month and carry the documents to be handed over to our Ministry of Health.

The petition itself has many updates, and the total package would take over 1,500 pages of printed matter, not including many audio and video files. The entire collection will be given to the Minister in a Disk.

Meanwhile, the petition, its updates and comments on the updates, have been converted into an interactive audio book, which can be found in the iTunes stores. The name of the book is still Glyphosate Petition. I think it might benefit from a change of name, to something like “An activist’s handbook to RoundUp resistance.”
The link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1098801707

Further, I made a video with my 13 minute rant on the subject, which you can see here.

[youtube IMb7iHCXRVU]

This book is for activists and those that want to make a difference with our Government.

  1. It is not for agro-industry scientists that wish to push voodoo science to the public without allowing independent verification of their claim.
  2. It is not for people that wish to promote the idea that all food should belong to patent holding corporations and their investors.
  3. It is not for those that wish to hang out with anti-GMO talking heads, who will speak about how bad the technology is, but will leave to us the unenviable task of confronting and challenging our Government, who allows these toxins into our food web.

It is for those of us that have done enough listening, and wish to directly involve in doing something, anything, within our means, to push back at our government.

Thanks.

A letter to a mayor

Apr 2, 2016 — To: The Mayor Ms Luis Jackson,
Delta Corporation
April 1st, 2016 (not a prank)
Subject : Test Glyphosate in Delta’s water, soil and food.

Mayor Jackson,

Good day.

I write to you, yet again, regarding potential dangers linked with exposure  to Glyphosate for residents of Delta, and what the municipality could do.

Delta has fertile lowlands and farms. Glyphosate is the most used chemical in Canadian food production. Besides, since our town is actually in the delta of the Fraser river, and comprises of tidal mudflats and lowlands, most runoff from farms, as well as from the upland forests go through our midst. Both these regions use glyphosate, in agriculture by farmers and aerially in hilly forests by logging corporations.

In spite of being the most used toxin in Canada and the planet for a generation, safety test records and data of this weed killer are kept hidden from Canadians, possibly illegally, to protect commercial interest of the promoter.

Legal precedence is already being set in some countries, where supreme court has overruled federal Governments about keeping safety documents hidden from the people. Apparently, commercial confidentiality agreements and intellectual property rights cannot trump public safety. So, if a corporation cannot divulge safety records of its product to the public, the product itself may not be approved by the Government either.

I have two different channels of communication ongoing with the Ottawa Government about this. One of them is an online petition through change.org for the Government to disclose all safety test documents, based on which it is supposed to have approved Glyphosate for use in Canadian agriculture and environment. Link : https://www.change.org/p/minister-of-health-canada-justin-trudeau-health-canada-prove-glyphosate-is-safe

The petition has generated a large number of follow up updates with input from scientists around the world and other notables, and has over 22,000 supporters, 98% from Canada. The volume of information on the petition has crossed a thousand pages, and MP Carla Qualtrough has agreed to see me so I can present all that to her and request her to hand deliver it to the minister in Health Canada, to either place the safety documents in public domain, or inform Canadians why they do not have a right to these safety documents, or perhaps arrange a debate on the floor of our parliament about if Canadian citizens have, or do not have, a right to see first hand, all safety test data on this herbicide that has been entering our food chain in ever increasing dose for a generation.

Meanwhile for the town of Delta, and perhaps many other towns where concerned Canadians have supported this petition, there are areas where our municipal governments could actively engage, at the bottom tier of our political system, to address this issue in the following manner:
1)
Start having our food, water, and soil, tested for concentration of Glyphosate. This could not even be done just a few years ago since labs did not offer such services, especially about testing our food for Glyphosate. But this can easily be done today. Increasing number of accredited labs are offering a high quality service. And some of the labs are nearby, such as in Burnaby. This testing is legal, and reasonably easy to do for a Municipal corporation. The reason so many labs are now scrambling to offer this service, is because our Government has started a massive effort to test our food, but behind closed doors, more or less from the time World Health Organization decided to reclassify Glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.
2)
Start placing these test results online and available for any research student, scholar, scientist or concerned citizen to read, download and follow up on, should they so desire.

3)
Inform all parties, such as farmers, or loggers or nature park managers, that samples will be drawn from their areas after application of the herbicide, or when its concentration is noted to be highest, and also in off season, to get an idea of seasonal variation, and to start tracking the toxic load in regions within Delta.
4)
This data should be available to local hospitals and doctors, to check if reports of skin rashes, gastro-intestinal or auto-immune disorders, especially among children, seem to be following the rise and fall of prevalence of Glyphosate, in which case any research organization would now have some data to start working on, to investigate if some ailments might be linked to Glyphosate exposure. The municipality need not get involved in this research, but can easily and legally offer accumulated data. Why ? Because that aught to be our first line of defence against environment induced ill-health and it aught to be the duty of our town council to ensure the residents are protected from the most used and most controversial agriculture and environmental toxin in Canada.
5)
This data should also be available to wildlife research scientists that are investigating sudden population decline, unexpected mass death, skewring of sex ration in newborns, or disappearance of creatures starting from bees, birds, amphibians, herbivores and even whales.
6)
Invite volunteers to check if recommended limits of dose of glyphosate is followed by those authorized to use it, like farmers and loggers, or exceeded by anybody. I have reason to believe that application of Glyphosate is not supervised by anybody, even if the packaging warns that it is (or may be) relatively safe only if applied according to instructions and within the maximum recommended dosage limits. I believe a municipality has the right to allow citizen volunteers a right to check if such limits are maintained, even if the council cannot afford employing people to do so for them.

This is not the first time I have written to the Delta Corporation on Glyphosate and what I wished the town council to consider engaging in. This is unlikely to be my last. I wish the municipality would take this seriously.
This letter will likely be included in the petition asking Ottawa to place all safety data on Glyphosate in the public domain. The reason this letter, and others written to other politicians, will be included is that battling indiscriminate use of an untested (it remains untested as long as the tests are hidden from people) and potentially hazardous chemical will need to be challenged on multiple fronts and the people would need to engage in it directly, and apply pressure on the politicians. It is my hope that this update, which reaches all 22,000 supporters of the petition across Canada and beyond, will influence a few hundred others to also write to their respective town councils, MPs and MLAs. Even if a single politician or town ends up being the first in initiating a program to track our food, soil, water and environment for glyphosate concentration, that will amount to a kicking in of the door, a pathfinder, and a worthy achievement that others might follow.
Should Delta Corporation have an interest in discussing this further, I shall be more than happy to attend.
Looking forward to a positive response,
With good wishes
Tony Mitra, 10891 Cherry Lane, Delta, BC, V4E 3L7, Canada

Publishing a few books

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Writing is a gift – or is it?

Somewhere down the track where we evolved from apes to hominids with a brain that could handle complex sentences and a language, the basic tools for being a speaker were hardwired in.

I am told that this change essentially distinguishes anatomically modern humans from archaic forms, and that this development is rather recent, perhaps under a hundred thousand years old.

And then, much more recently, a mere five to ten thousand years back, folks started scratching around on the sand, of the walls of their caves, to describe something or other – passing phase of the moon, or the tide, or animals that were around them. And as humans discovered pastoralism and agriculture, experienced perhaps the first population spurt, and started building their own homes and not depend on caves, they managed to figure out how to use those scratchings for record keeping and identification. Written text, or script, was on the way.

And thus, although we have not yet evolved to the point where ability to speak in a language or read and write is hardwired into our genetic construct, and we have come  some distance towards it. A normal child will automatically pick up a language without being expressly tutored, simply by being around others speaking a specific tongue. Writing or reading, unfortunately is something that a human needs to specifically learn. It does not come automatically by hanging around people, or books, or a pencil.

Nonetheless, it is perhaps a fair assumption that a lot of people around the world can read some and write some, in some language. A few fortunate ones are comfortable in two languages, and some in more than two.

And that brings me all the way to my own situation. I had mentioned I knew three languages – Bengali, which is my mother tongue, Hindi, which is India’s national language, and English, which is the language I used in my profession as well as one of the two working languages of my adopted nation – Canada.

The problem these three languages each uses its own distinct script. This means, even if I am conversant in speaking in those languages, I would need to be familiar with three distinct scripts, or letters, to be able to read or write in any of them. This can be better understood if one considers differences between European languages such as English, Spanish and French. They use the same script, with perhaps a small number of special characters in each. If one is proficient in any language, one could more or less read the other, even if he fumbled with the exact meaning of grammar of it. Not so in my case. The three languages use three different scripts. Hindi and Bengali are both derived from a common mother language – Sanskrit and fall in the same language family, and yet their script separated from each other early on, and now one needs to be totally familiar with the different scripts to be able to read a sentence.

Anyhow, I write very little in Hindi, although I did part of my early schooling in that language and my first tentative writings and childhood poems were composed in Hindi.

My later years in a different part of India in a different school system let me lose familiarity with  writing Hindi, while picking up two others – Bengali and English. Today, I can read Hindi and converse in it, but would struggle to write in it.

I type the fastest in english, but that is primarily because the computer keypad is designed for english, and adapting that keypad to other scripts has its hassles, and sometimes I have to press multiple keys to generate a single letter in Bengali, which automatically slows things down and increases chances of mistake. While I can usually type in English without looking at my fingers, I cannot do that easily for Bengali using the same keyboard.

Anyhow, I have a lot of writings done in English and Bengali. And now the time has come I feel, to start publishing some of them since self publication is reasonably easy.

Some years ago, I tried to write a novel, but it turned out to be more a musing of an opinionated immigrant that observed the world around not superficially at the surface, but using What could amount to be a maverick effort at penetration below the surface and check if what we see at the surface is sustainable, or if the root is getting rotten, or in indeed the surface is shiny but is blocking out other parts of our world intending to insert an element of romance, the guy had a Canadian girl with him as they travelled across western Canada. But it was not really up to him to write a romance, and the continuing novella turn out to be a conversation between the two, mostly covering the land, its geological transformation, and evolutionary track of the living world, including man’s involvement is it.

Nonetheless, the total writings might appear to be somewhat curious and did include musings that I believe deserve to be preserved.

Due to sheer bulk of material, the writings needed to be split into multiple volumes. The first volume, covering 133 pages, was put up today. Its sections went as follows :

Captor description : Early writings
Section 1: A vanishing world
Section 2: Missing the world of his father’s paintings
Section 3: Golden
Section 4: An universe for an anchor
Section 5: Quantum mechanics of mass hysteria
Section 6: Storm warning
Section 7: Wish I could write like them
Section 8: Miguel, the Everglades and Lovelock’s warning
Section 9: Eocene Thermal maximum in a bowl of soup
Section 10: When you are right and wrong at the same time
Section 11: Rice in the Vedas
Section 12: Autobiographic blues
Section 13: At the water’s edge
Section 14: How green was my Facebook
Section 15: Suta at the riviera
Section 16: Coffee with a giant rhynoceros
Section 17: Considering Mabel
Section 18: Overload
Section 19: A sunset, mitochondria, peat bog, and a kiss
Section 20: A few pages on a leap year day
Section 21: The ten thousand year old woman
Section 22: The vanishing Y chromosome
Section 23: Cult of Tagore
Section 24: Old woman sacrifices herself.
Section 25: Hello world

And so, I compiled these twenty five blogs into 25 sections of chapter 1 of the book. The book has only one chapter but 25 sections, and is 133 pages long.

And then I converted it into an iBook (epub) format and uploaded it in Apple store.

Next, I exported it to pdf, reimported that for kindle and uploaded it again at Kindle.

Now, I can go have a coffee and plant some more seeds.

Ledikeni, Sepoy Mutiny, Nova Scotia, and Glyphosate

It all started with me looking afresh at the list of 21,000 folks that supported my petition for the Government of Canada, Ministry of Health, to disclose safety test data on the chemical Glyphosate, in herbicide RoundUp and VisionMax, by Monsanto. That lead me to a few places in Canada were apparently named after a Mr. Canning where the petition had a few supporters. I knew the name Canning, as the last name of a noted English high born family of the mid nineteenth century. I remembered a place in India bearing the same name. Further, the name reminded me of a number of mystical water colour paintings of India created more than 150 years ago, by a noble Englishwoman named Charlotte Canning, or Lady Canning, perhaps the most prolific of all major female painters from India till date. Finally, I remembered a local sweet of Bengal that was named after Lady Canning – “ledikeni”. And all of this, somehow, was vaguely related to my effort to raise awareness on the dangers of the synthetic molecule glyphosate.

Charlotte Canning

Lastly, I contemplated covering this tenuous link between seemingly unconnected far flung towns spanning opposite ends of the globe, as a chapter of my never ending book – from the unique perspective of an immigrant from eastern part of India, to settle in the western edge of Canada, who was also involved in finding ways to expose, raise awareness on, and help curb within my means a reckless use of the toxin glyphosate, which I believes to be at the root of not just a global health crisis, but also a symbol of a crisis of civilization where sovereignty of nations were being undermined by corporate power.

Ironically, the first global corporation that emerged, and had enough power to subjugate large nations and even entire continents – is the East India Company, whose seat of power within India was a mere hundred miles from my birth place.

Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The petition allows me to download a list of supporters and their towns, but not their emails of contact details. I was looking at the data to see if I could figure out which provinces and towns had how many people that had reservation about Glyphosate being present in our food or environment, and thus ended up supporting my petition.

In the process I came across two locations in Canada that drew my attention.

I had three supporters from a village named Canning, in Nova Socitia, on the far eastern edge of Canada, and four more from the town of Cannington, Ontario, in the outskirts of Toronto.

Courtesy – Victoria & Albert Museum, London

For me, a visit to the village of Canning, Nova Scotia, if undertaken by road, would involve a 6,000 km drive that would likely take me nine days of driving six hours a day, conducted largely across the border through nine states in USA and then three provinces in Canada, literally a coast to coast journey, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Having been born in in Santiniketan, near Kolkata, India, I could not help but compare it to a hypothetical trip from that eastern town of india, right through the country, then crossing multiple international borders and driving through Pakistan, Iran, Isis controlled regions of Iraq and possibly Syria, then into Turkey and driving right across its length to the edge of Bosphorus straight, to the city of Istanbul.

But of course I was not planning to drive, either to Canning, Nova Scotia or to Istanbul, Turkey. I had already been to Nova Scotia, and might have driven right past Canning on my way to Halifax. And I had already been to Istanbul a long time ago, as a sailor whose ship docked there.

Courtesy – Victoria & Albert Museum, London

But the name of Canning and Cannington, struck a bell. Coming from West Bengal, India, I was aware of a coastal village called Canning, to the south of Kolkata, and a Bengali sweet called “ladikeni” which is derived from an English noble woman of the time, Lady Canning.

I wondered if these names, Canning and Cannington in Canada and Canning in India, halfway across the planet, had any link. And, as I soon found out, they did have a common link – a family name of the British aristocracy, of Earls, a title that, in absence of any living descendant, died out a generation after family was elevated to the rank of Earl.

The village of Canning, Nova Scotia, and the neighbourhood of Cannington, Ontario were named after the British Prime Minister George Canning. The coastal village in India was named after Lord Charles Canning, son of George, who was the Governor General of India during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, later promoted to Viceroy, and the family rank elevated to Earl. He was also the last Canning of his lineage, since he and his wife Charlotte did not leave any descendant, and therefore were the first and the last Canning with the title of an Earl.

Sepoy mutiny was the first and only major nationwide armed rebellion against British rule in India. It was participated mostly by the sepoy, or the Indian rank and file soldiers of the Royal British Army, in which the general population of India did not take part. After a brutal and bloody rebellion, the uprising was eventually subdued, having failed to dislodge the British from power. It did, however, usher in a lot of changes to the nature of the administrative system overseeing the British colony for the next ninety years, till India finally gained independence in 1947.

The mutiny was the first major rebellion in India against British rule, where Indian soldiers actually killed many of their white superior officers as well as European civilians. It was also occasion where Hindu and Muslim soldiers fought side by side against a perceived common enemy, the British. The next time this was to happen would be during the second world war, almost three generations later, when an Indian National Army under Subhash Bose would fight the British on Indian soil in Kohima during the later phase of the second world war.

Images of the Sepoy Mutiny, 1857

The mutiny also signalled the end of rule of a Corporation – British East India Company. From that point on, the British Government under Queen Victoria, took over the reigns of India. The country would thence be a British colony for the next ninety years, till Gandhi and a new generation of Indians took up the movement and spread it to the Indian masses on a platform of non-violence from the inside, and Subhash Bose declared war on Britain by the Indian national army from the outside, developments that eventually resulted in a split subcontinent gaining independence as two separate nations – India and Pakistan, in 1947. Pakistan was to bifurcate again with Bangladesh as an offshoot in 1971.

Images of the Sepoy Mutiny

Meanwhile, Governor General and later viceroy Charles Canning made some significant changes in the way of British policy towards ruling India in the aftermath of the mutiny and the brutal suppression and revenge killing that ensued. Two of the best known measures where conflicting and controversial, and one of them had a long standing historical relevance to this day.

The first was his observation that the success of the mutiny and its brutal effect in killing British and other white people was because the entire Indian solider class fought together without internal friction and hatred, in spite of the historical animosity between the Hindu and Muslim factions. Therefore, the British should adopt a policy of stoking this hatred and keeping the soldiers divided along religious lines, so the soldiers would no more be united, and each would prefer the British to maintain balance of force and each would assist the British in preventing any effort of the other to take over the reins of India. Thus, the Indian soldier should never again pose a unified threat to British Rule. That policy advice and doctrine became a sort of standard British policy all the way to India’s independence, and was critical in triggering the eventual “partition” of the nation along religious lines after a horrific sectarian violence and religious riots – ending up in creation of the nations of a Muslim majority Pakistan as a separate nation alongside a Hindu majority India.

Viscountess Charlotte Canning at right.

The second notable act of Lord Canning was his decision that the British should not indiscriminately punish every Indian soldier that did not fight on alongside the British during the mutiny, and instead, make a distinction between the actual rebels that took up arms against the British and those that abandoned the army in the wake of the turmoil and went back home, to sit out the mutiny. For this act of clemency, against deep rooted and loud protest from other British officials, he was also given the nick name – “Clemency Canning”. His post of Governor General was also elevated to Viceroy. He came to India after Marquess of Dalhousie and he was succeeded by Lord Elgin.

Today, a lot of places around the world has bears the name of Canning, mostly for the father but also the son. Surprisingly, the place “Canning, West Bengal, India” is not listed, or I could not find a reference to it in wikipedia and a few other resources, possibly because no volunteer offered to add that information.

George Canning, FRS, former British Prime Minister

Bengali people like sweets. And one of the enduring sweets is ledikeni – named after Lady Canning. That was Charlotte Canning, or Countess Canning, wife of Lord Charles Canning, Governor General and later Viceroy of India. She reportedly liked that sweet, or might have actually created it or popularized it.

Charlotte Canning was better known around the world as perhaps the best known woman artist of India of the time, and perhaps even till now. Some three hundred and fifty water colour paintings of her can be seen in Victoria and Albert Museum in London, most of them of scenes and people from India. Most of them are in ink, pencil, pastel or water colour wash. Most of them are also exquisite and carries a nostalgic sense of the times a century and half ago.

Earl Charles Canning, former Viceroy of India

Photography was just being invented and popularized around the time, and had arrived in India. So, Lord and Lady Canning also arranged to create and collect a vast number of photographs depicting various regions and people of India, which has left an enduring photographic record of the times.

She died in India a few years after the mutiny, in 1961, at the prime age of 44, from malaria. In that short span, and an even shorter combined tenure in India, she produced some 350 water colours representing the country, and thus left her legacy that has endured perhaps even more than her illustrious husband or father-in-law.

Lady Charlotte Canning

Fast forward to the present and I was looking at the names of three people from a single village of Canning, Nova Scotia, a thinly populated eastern province in Canada signing up on my petition on Glyphosate. This should not come as a surprise – Nova Scotia, along with Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, are often lumped together in calculations of pesticide use,  and has the highest per capita and per acre pesticide load in Canada. The region also enjoys the dubious unenviable record of being a sort of cancer capital for Canada. The region was also being used extensively for aerial spraying of Agent Orange on an experimental basis, before it was used in Vietnam, and for which deformed babies are still a fact of life there, and people in the eastern Canada are still fighting for the Government to accept that people were poisoned during that horrific test by American producers.

That leaves four more people from Cannington on the outskirts of Toronto, Ontario that also signed into the petition. I did speak in Toronto, Ontario, along with Dr. Thierry Vrain, about the dangers associated with allowing glyphosate in our environment. Perhaps some of the people signing up from there had heard me speaking.

Ledikeni

And that leaves the Bengali sweet “ledikeni”, which survives till this day in West Bengal, India. A cheese-based fried sweet, its distinctive features is its molten sugar syrup of lightly flavored cardamom powder. One of the main ingredient of any Indian sweet is of course – sugar. In India, it is made from Sugarcane.

These days, the sugarcane plants is being desiccated with RoundUp, with Glyphosate as a killer poison, in many parts of Bengal, I am told. So, it is more than possible, and very likely that the sweet ledikeni, prepared in Bengal today, contains glyphosate and will bring its share of ill-health to the people of Eastern India, much as any sweet in Canada or USA, coming for sugar beet, also laced with Glyphosate, is bringing ill-health in North America.

Click to go to the petition

And that brings me back to where I am, looking at the list of 21,000 people that supported my petitions, and trying trying to find new ways to resist the approval of this chemical for use in Canadian agriculture on one side, and trying to add a chapter for my book on the other.

And, I so like the paintings of Charlotte Canning.

Bill C-51. What is a Canadian to do?

I am in search of an expert that is willing to speak with me on record about Bill C-51 and how it might affect free speech and rights of Canadian citizens, as well as why Canada should need such a law


Bill C-51, also known as Anti-terrorism Act, 2015, was proposed by Conservative MP Steven Blaney, was discussed in the parliament, voted on, got Royal assent and became law in the summer of 2015.
Part 1 of this bill is suspected to be an act legitimizing sharing of secret information about Canadians citizens by Canadian security agencies.
Part 2 is suspected to enact a Secure Air Travel Act that can restrict rights of air travel to suspect individuals.
Part 3 is suspected to amend the Criminal Code.

I use the word “suspect” because I do not consider myself an expert on the bill, and neither have I studied the bill personally. However, the implication of the bill concerns me as a citizen of Canada. I wish to learn more about it, and wish to spread awareness about it for Canadian citizens.I am aware that the bill, proposed by a conservative MP and supported by the Conservative party then in power, did not have the necessary votes to pass it, and that the Liberal party in opposition voted in support of the motion, thus providing it with the necessary number.
I have so far failed to get hold of a person that is able and willing to speak on record, preferably in short clips of no more than 5 or ten minutes, on what precisely the wordings of some sections of the bill is, and how this can affect citizens rights, either providing better security or taking away their rights to due process of justice.
There is a broader question as to why precisely does the Canadian Government need this anti-terrorism act, and if Canada is engaged internationally in actions that are expected to expose Canadian citizens back home to acts of retaliation or terror. The traditional image of Canada had been one that is a kind, peace brokering sympathetic nations that does not engage in foreign wars that are not our business. As a result, traditional Canada should not need to curtail its citizen’s freedom in order to stop terrorists around the world.So, what has changed ?Since I have been frustrated in my effort to find an expert that is willing to speak on record, and ask direct questions, I wrote this letter to the Canadian Bar Association, based on their online executive summary on the bill.


To the Canadian Bar Association
Hello,
I am a blogger (www.tonu.org), podcaster, amateur videographer (https://www.youtube.com/user/Tonymitra/videos), wild bird photographer (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonu/), aspiring writer, a food security activist, a backyard organic farmer, a retired marine engineer and a concerned citizen of Canada. My blog gets between a thousand and two thousand hits a day.
I have been concerned about bill C-51 and its implications. I have been on a search to find a suitable person that is able and willing to speak with me, preferably on record, in order to create an brief audio podcast or a video to accompany a blog for the people, to explain how rights and freedom of Canadian citizens might be compromised by the bill C-51 and its broader implications as to why this bill has been created and what a secretive Government could do with this bill, to the people of Canada and to people outside of Canada, and why it should be important for Canadians to act on it, either supporting it or resisting it.
I have found many people that do not like the bill. I too do not like it instinctively. But unfortunately I am yet to find anyone that is knowledgable, has read the bill thoroughly, has checked how it infringes against people’s freedom point by point, and is willing to educate us on it.
I write to you because I have read your Executive summary on C-51, the anti-terrorism act of 2015 (http://iclmg.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2015/03/15-15-eng-Executive-Summary.pdf).

From Canadian Bar Association summary

From Canadian Bar Association summary

Can you help connect me with a person that might be willing to speak with me on record of the specifics of this bill and how each of them impact our freedom?I live in Delta, BC, and am able to drive within the lower mainlands in BC, or connect over the phone or on skype.
Thanking you
Tony Mitra
(contacts)


A sort of petition to the Liberal Govt

Open Letter to MPs, to amend or kill C-51

The following is an open letter addressed to all members of Parliament and signed by more than 100 Canadian professors of law and related disciplines.

Dear Members of Parliament,

Please accept this collective open letter as an expression of the signatories’ deep concern that Bill C-51 (which the government is calling the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015) is a dangerous piece of legislation in terms of its potential impacts on the rule of law, on constitutionally and internationally protected rights, and on the health of Canada’s democracy.

Beyond that, we note with concern that knowledgeable analysts have made cogent arguments not only that Bill C-51 may turn out to be ineffective in countering terrorism by virtue of what is omitted from the bill, but also that Bill C-51 could actually be counter-productive in that it could easily get in the way of effective policing, intelligence-gathering and prosecutorial activity. In this respect, we wish it to be clear that we are neither “extremists” (as the Prime Minister has recently labelled the Official Opposition for its resistance to Bill C-51) nor dismissive of the real threats to Canadians’ security that government and Parliament have a duty to protect. Rather, we believe that terrorism must be countered in ways that are fully consistent with core values (that include liberty, non-discrimination, and the rule of law), that are evidence-based, and that are likely to be effective.

The scope and implications of Bill C-51 are so extensive that it cannot be, and is not, the purpose of this letter to itemize every problem with the bill. Rather, the discussion below is an effort to reflect a basic consensus over some (and only some) of the leading concerns, all the while noting that any given signatory’s degree of concern may vary item by item. Also, the absence of a given matter from this letter is not meant to suggest it is not also a concern.

We are grateful for the service to informed public debate and public education provided, since Bill C-51 was tabled, by two highly respected law professors — Craig Forcese of the University of Ottawa and Kent Roach of the University of Toronto — who, combined, have great expertise in national security law at the intersection of constitutional law, criminal law, international law and other sub-disciplines. What follows — and we limit ourselves to five points — owes much to the background papers they have penned, as well as to insights from editorials in the media and speeches in the House of Commons.

Accordingly, we urge all MPs to vote against Bill C-51 for the following reasons:

  1. Bill C-51 enacts a new security-intelligence information-sharing statute of vast scope with no enhanced protections for privacy and from abuse. The law defines “activities that undermine the security of Canada” in such an exceptionally broad way that “terrorism” is simply one example of nine examples, and only “lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression” is excluded. Apart from all the civil-disobedience activities and illegal protests or strikes that will be covered (e.g. in relation to “interference with critical infrastructure”), this deep and broad intrusion into privacy is made worse by the fact there are no corresponding oversight or review mechanisms adequate to this expansion of the state’s new levels of information awareness. Concerns have already been expressed by the Privacy Commissioner, an Officer of Parliament, who has insufficient powers and resources to even begin to oversee, let alone correct abuses within, this expanded information-sharing system. And there is virtually nothing in the bill that recognizes any lessons learned from what can happen when information-sharing ends up in the wrong hands, as when the RCMP supplied poor information to US authorities that in turn led to the rendition of Maher Arar to Syria and his subsequent torture based on that – and further – information coming from Canada.
  2. Bill C-51 enacts a new “terrorism” offence that makes it criminal to advocate or encourage “terrorism offences in general” where one does this being reckless as to whether the communication “may” contribute to someone else deciding to commit another terrorism offence. It is overbroad, unnecessary in view of current criminal law, and potentially counter-productive. Keep in mind how numerous and broad are the existing terrorism offences in the Criminal Code, some of which go beyond what the ordinary citizen imagines when they think of terrorism and all of which already include the general criminal-law prohibitions on counselling, aiding and abetting, conspiring, and so on: advocacy or encouragement of any of these “in general” could attract prosecution under the new C-51 offence. Note as well that gestures and physical symbols appear to be caught, and not just verbal or written exhortations. In media commentary and reports, there have been many examples of what could be caught, including in some contexts advocacy of armed revolution and rebellion in other countries (e.g. if C-51 had been the law when thousands of Canadians advocated support for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in its efforts to overthrow apartheid by force of arms, when that was still part of the ANC’s strategy). So, the chill for freedom of speech is real. In addition, in a context in which direct incitement to terrorist acts (versus of “terrorism offences in general”) is already a crime in Canada, this vague and sweeping extension of the criminal law seems unjustified in terms of necessity – and indeed, the Prime Minister during Question Period has been unable or unwilling to give examples of what conduct he would want to see criminalized now that is not already prohibited by the Criminal Code. But, perhaps most worrying is how counter-productive this new crime could be. De-radicalization outreach programs could be negatively affected. Much anti-radicalization work depends on frank engagement of authorities like the RCMP, alongside communities and parents, with youth who hold extreme views, including some views that, if expressed (including in private), would contravene this new prohibition. Such outreach may require “extreme dialogue” in order to work through the misconceptions, anger, hatred and other emotions that lead to radicalization. If C-51 is enacted, these efforts could find themselves stymied as local communities and parents receive advice that, if youth participating in these efforts say what they think, they could be charged with a crime. As a result, the RCMP may cease to be invited in at all, or, if they are, engagement will be fettered by restraint that defeats the underlying methods of the programme. And the counter-productive impact could go further. The Prime Minister himself confirmed he would want the new law used against young people sitting in front of computers in their family basements, youth who can express extreme views on social-media platforms. Why is criminalization counter-productive here? As a National Post editorial pointed out, the result of Bill C-51 could easily be that one of the best sources of intelligence for possible future threats — public social-media platforms — could dry up; that is, extreme views will go silent because of fears of being charged. This undercuts the usefulness of these platforms for monitoring and intelligence that lead to knowing not only who warrants further investigative attention but also whether early intervention in the form of de-radicalization outreach efforts are called for.
  3. Bill C-51 would allow CSIS to move from its central current function — information-gathering and associated surveillance with respect to a broad area of “national security” matters — to being a totally different kind of agency that now may actively intervene to disrupt activities by a potentially infinite range of unspecified measures, as long as a given measure falls shy of causing bodily harm, infringements on sexual integrity or obstructions of justice. CSIS agents can do this activity both inside and outside Canada, and they can call on any entity or person to assist them. There are a number of reasons to be apprehensive about this change of role. One only has to recall that the CSIS Act defines “threats to the security of Canada” so broadly that CSIS already considers various environmental and Aboriginal movements to be subject to their scrutiny; that is to say, this new disruption power goes well beyond anything that has any connection at all to “terrorism” precisely because CSIS’s mandate in the CSIS Act goes far beyond a concern only with terrorism. However, those general concerns expressed, we will now limit ourselves to the following serious problem: how Bill C-51 seems to display a complete misunderstanding of the role of judges in our legal system and constitutional order. Under C-51, judges may now be asked to give warrants to allow for disruption measures that contravene Canadian law or the Charter, a role that goes well beyond the current contexts in which judges now give warrants (e.g. surveillance warrants and search and seizure warrants) where a judge’s role is to ensure that these investigative measures are “reasonable” so as not to infringe section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights. What C-51 now does is turn judges into agents of the executive branch (here, CSIS) to pre-authorize violations of Canadian law and, even, to pre-authorize infringements of almost any Charter right as long as the limits in C-51 – bodily harm, sexual integrity and obstruction of justice – are respected. This completely subverts the normal role of judges, which is to assess whether measures prescribed by law or taken in accordance with discretion granted by statute infringed rights — and, if they did, whether the Charter has been violated because the infringement cannot be justified under the Charter’s section 1 limitation clause. Now, a judge can be asked (indeed, required) to say yes in advance to measures that could range from wiping a target’s computer clear of all information to fabricating materials (or playing agent-provocateur roles) that discredit a target in ways that cause others no longer to trust him, her or it: and these examples are possibly at the mild end of what CSIS may well judge as useful “disruption” measures to employ. It is also crucial to note that CSIS is authorized to engage in any measures it chooses if it concludes that the measure would not be “contrary” to any Canadian law or would not “contravene” the Charter. Thus, it is CSIS that decides whether to even go to a judge. There is reason to be worried about how unregulated (even by courts) this new CSIS disruption power would be, given the evidence that CSIS has in the past hidden information from its review body, SIRC, and given that a civil-servant whistleblower has revealed that, in a parallel context, Ministers of Justice in the Harper government have directed Department of Justice lawyers to conclude that the Minister can certify under the Department of Justice Act that a law is in compliance with the Charter if there is a mere 5% chance a court would uphold the law if it was challenged in court. Finally, it is crucial to add that these warrant proceedings will take place in secret, with only the government side represented, and no prospect of appeal. Warrants will not be disclosed to the target and, unlike police investigations, CSIS activities do not culminate in court proceedings where state conduct is then reviewed.
  4. We now draw attention to effectiveness by noting a key omission from C-51. As the Official Opposition noted in its “reasoned amendment” when it moved that C-51 not be given Second Reading, Bill C-51 does not include “the type of concrete, effective measures that have been proven to work, such as working with communities ‎on measures to counter radicalization of youth – may even undermine outreach.” This speaks for itself, and we will not elaborate beyond saying that, within a common commitment to countering terrorism, effective measures of the sort referenced in the reasoned amendment not only are necessary but also must be vigorously pursued and well-funded. The government made no parallel announcements alongside Bill C-51 that would suggest that these sort of measures are anywhere near the priority they need to be.
  5. Finally, the defects noted in points 1, 2 and 3 (information-sharing, criminalizing expression, and disruption) are magnified by the overarching lack of anything approaching adequate oversight and review functions, at the same time as existing accountability mechanisms have been weakened and in some cases eliminated in recent years. Quite simply, Bill C-51 continues the government’s resolute refusal to respond to 10 years of calls for adequate and integrated review of intelligence and related security-state activities, which was first (and perhaps best) articulated by Justice O’Connor in a dedicated volume in his report on what had happened to Maher Arar. Only last week, former prime ministers and premiers wrote an open letter saying that a bill like C-51 cannot be enacted absent the kind of accountability processes and mechanisms that will catch and hopefully prevent abuses of the wide new powers CSIS and a large number of partner agencies will now have (note that CSIS can enlist other agencies and any person in its disruption activities and the information-sharing law concerns over a dozen other government agencies besides CSIS). Even if one judged all the new CSIS powers in C-51 to be justified, they must not be enacted without proper accountability. Here, we must note that the government’s record has gone in the opposite direction from enhanced accountability. Taking CSIS alone, the present government weakened CSIS’s accountability by getting rid of an oversight actor, the Inspector General, whose job was to keep the Minister of Public Security on top of CSIS activity in real time. It transferred this function to CSIS’s review body, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), which does not have anything close to the personnel or resources to carry this function out – given it does not have sufficient staff and resources to carry out its existing mandate to ensure CSIS acts within the law. Beyond staff, we note that SIRC is a body that has for some time not been at a full complement of members, even as the government continues to make no apology for having once appointed as SIRC’s Chair someone with no qualifications (and it turns out, no character) to be on SIRC let alone to be its chair (Arthur Porter). And, as revealed in a recent CBC investigation, the government has simply not been straight with Canadians when it constantly says SIRC is a robust and well-resourced body: its budget is a mere $3 million, which has flat-lined since 2005 when the budget was $2.9 million, even as its staff has been cut from 20 in 2005 to 17 now. Without an integrated security-intelligence review mechanism, which should also include some form of Parliamentary oversight and/or review, and with especially SIRC (with jurisdiction only over CSIS) not a fully effective body, we are of the view that no MP should in good conscience be voting for Bill C-51.

Above, we have limited ourselves to five central concerns, but it is important to reiterate that some or all of the signatories have serious concerns about a good number of other aspects of C-51 – and/or about detailed aspects of some of the concerns that were generally expressed in the above five points. The following are some (but only some) of those concerns, in point form. They are included by way of saying that signatories believe these all need to be looked at closely and rigorously during House of Commons committee study of C-51, now that it has passed Second Reading:

  • C-51 radically lowers the threshold for preventive detention and imposition of recognizance with conditions on individuals. Only three years ago, Parliament enacted a law saying this detention/conditions regime can operate if there is a reasonable basis for believing a person “will” commit a terrorist offence. Now, that threshold has been lowered to “may.” There has been a failure of the government to explain why exactly the existing power has not been adequate. In light of the huge potential for abuse of such a low threshold, including through wide-scale use (recalling the mass arrests at the time of the War Measures Act in Quebec), Canadians and parliamentarians need to know why extraordinary new powers are needed, especially when the current ones were enacted in the context of ongoing threats by Al-Qaeda to carry out attacks in Canada that seem no less serious than the ones currently being threatened by entities like ISIS and Al-Shabab.
  • C-51 expands the no-fly list regime. It seems to have simply replicated the US no-fly list rules, the operation of which has been widely criticized in terms of its breadth and impacts on innocent people. Is this the right regime for Canada?
  • C-51’s new disruption warrants now allows CSIS to impinge on the RCMP’s law enforcement role, bringing back turf wars that were eliminated when intelligence and law enforcement were separated in the wake of the RCMP’s abusive disruption activities of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But, even more important than turf wars is the potential for CSIS behaviour in the form of disruptive measures to undermine both the investigation and the prosecution of criminal cases by interfering with evidentiary trail, contaminating evidence, and so on.
  • C-51, in tandem with C-44, permits CSIS to engage not just in surveillance and information-gathering abroad, but also in disruption. There are many questions about how this will work. The danger of lawlessness seems to be significantly greater for CSIS activities abroad, in that CSIS only needs to seek approval for disruption under C-51 where Canadian, not foreign, law could be breached or where the Charter could be contravened (with Canadian law on the application of the Charter outside Canada being quite unclear at the moment). And there is no duty for CSIS to coordinate with or seek approval from the Department of Foreign Affairs, such that the chances of interference with the conduct of Canada’s foreign affairs cannot be discounted. Nor can we ignore the likely tendency for disruption measures abroad to be more threatening to individuals’ rights than in Canada: for example, Parliament needs to know whether CSIS agents abroad can engage in detention and rendition to agencies of other countries under the new C-51 regime.

We end by observing that this letter is dated Feb. 23, 2015, which is also the day when the government has chosen to cut off Second Reading debate on Bill C-51 after having allocated a mere three days (in reality, only portions of each of those days) to debate. In light of the sweeping scope and great importance of this bill, we believe that circumventing the ability of MPs to dissect the bill, and their responsibility to convey their concerns to Canadians at large before a Second Reading vote, is a troubling undermining of our Parliamentary democracy’s capacity to hold majority governments accountable. It is sadly ironic that democratic debate is being curtailed on a bill that vastly expands the scope of covert state activity when that activity will be subject to poor or even non-existent democratic oversight or review.

In conclusion, we urge all Parliamentarians to ensure that C-51 not be enacted in anything resembling its present form.

Yours sincerely,

Jennie Abell, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Amir Attaran, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law , University of Ottawa
Natasha Bakht, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Clayton Bangsund, Assistant Professor, College of Law, University of Saskatchewan
Margaret Beare, Professor of Law and Sociology, York University
Faisal Bhabha, Assistant Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Jennifer Bond, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Suzanne Bouclin, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law – Civil Law, University of Ottawa
Susan Boyd, Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Sarah Buhler, Assistant Professor, College of Law, University of Saskatchewan
Karen Busby, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba, and Director, Centre for Human Rights Research
Michael Byers, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Global Politics and International Law, University of British Columbia
Angela Cameron, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Pascale Chapdelaine, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Larry Chartrand, Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Allison Christians, H. Heward Stikeman Chair in Tax Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University
Brenda Cossman, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Stephen Coughlan, Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University
François Crépeau, Hans & Tamar Openheimer Professor in Public International Law, Faculty of Law, McGill University
Hugo Cyr, Professor of Law, University of Quebec in Montreal
Jennifer E. Dalton, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, York University
Maneesha Deckha, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Julie Desrosiers, Professor, Faculty of Law, University Laval
Peter Dietsch, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal
Stacy Douglas, Assistant Professor, Department of Law & Legal Studies, Carleton University
Susan Drummond, Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Isabelle Duplessis, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
Stuart Farson, Adjunct Professor, Political Science, Simon Fraser University
Gerry Ferguson, Distinguished Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Leonard, Findlay, Professor, College of Arts and Science, University of Saskatchewan, and Director, Humanities Research Unit
Colleen Flood, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa; Research Chair in Health Law & Policy
Fabien Gélinas, Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University
Daphne Gilbert, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Jassmine Girgis, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary
Isabel Grant, Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Marie Annik Grégoire, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
Sakej Henderson, Professor, University of Saskatchewan, Research Director, Native Law Centre of Canada
Gleider I. Hernández, Senior Lecturer in Public International Law, Durham Law School
Steve Hewitt, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Birmingham
Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, York University
Felix Hoehn, Assistant Professor, College of Law, University of Saskatchewan
Jula Hughes, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick
Allan Hutchinson, Distinguished Research Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Shin Imai, Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Martha Jackman, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Juliet Johnson, Associate Professor, Political Science, McGill University
Rebecca Johnson, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Jasminka Kalajdzic, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Charis Kamphuis, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University
John Keyes, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Muharem Kianieff, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Jeff King, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Laws, University College London
Jennifer Koshan, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary
François J. Larocque, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Fannie Lafontaine, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair on International Criminal Justice and Human Rights, University Laval
Louis-Philippe Lampron, Professor, Faculty of Law, Laval University
Nicole LaViolette, Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Jean Leclair, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
Ed Levy, Retired Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Brian Lewis, Professor of History, McGill University
Jamie Liew, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Catherine Lu, Associate Professor, Political Science, McGill University
Audrey Macklin, Professor of Law and Chair in Human Rights Law, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Alice MacLachlan, Associate Professor, Philosophy, York University
Warren Magnusson, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria
Kathleen Mahoney, Professor of Law, University of Calgary; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Marie Manikis, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University
John Manwaring, Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Michael Marin, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Graham Mayeda, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Sheila McIntyre, Professor Emerita, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Michael M’Gonigle, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Cynthia Milton, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Montreal
Richard Moon, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Mary Jane Mossman, Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Claire Mummé, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Roxanne Mykitiuk, Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Pierre Noreau, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
Darren O’Toole, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Charles-Maxime Panaccio, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Steven Penney, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Alberta
Denise Reaume, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Philip Resnick, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, University of British Columbia
Darryl Robinson, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
David Robitaille, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Ottawa and trustee at the Quebec Centre for Environmental Law
Sanda Rodgers, Professor Emerita, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Bruce Ryder, Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, and Academic Director, Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program
Hengameh Saberi, Assistant Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Calvin Sandborn, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, Legal Director, UVic Environmental Law Centre
Steven Savit, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Jennifer Schulz, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba
Dayna Scott. Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, and Graduate Program Director
Noel Semple, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Martha Shaffer, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Elizabeth Sheehy, Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
James Sheptycki, Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University
James Stewart, Assistant Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Donald Stuart, Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law – Civil Law, University of Ottawa, and Vice-Dean, Research and Communications
François Tanguay-Renaud, Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, and Director, Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security
David Tanovich, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Christine Tappolet, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal
Saul Templeton, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary
Kimberley N. Trapp, Senior Lecturer in International Law, Faculty of Laws, University College London
Gus Van Harten, Associate Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Lucinda Vandervort, Professor, College of Law, University of Saskatchewan
Wilfrid Waluchow, Professor, Senator William McMaster Chair in Constitutional Studies, Department of Philosophy, McMaster University
Christopher Waters, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor
Wesley Pue, Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Reg Whitaker, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, York University, and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria
David Wiseman, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law – Common Law, University of Ottawa
Stepan Wood, Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

Relevant Links :

Bill C-51 (Historical)
Openmedia Petition